“Kindred to Treason”: Conspiracy Laws in the United States
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
9-2024
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197680995.003.0006
Abstract
This chapter challenges the presumed movement of time encompassed in a major organizing theme of recent historiography: state-building. The very term incorporates an implicit idea of the time of political economy within its contours — imagining that the history of the modern state moves forward toward modern social welfare and disciplinary state bureaucracy. The chapter offers a countervailing view in its interpretation of the early history of treason and conspiracy prosecutions in the aftermath of putative armed rebellions against the United States. In the early years of the republic, it argues, national political leaders struggled with the question of how to enforce federal authority in an era with little enforcement bureaucracy, and in which widespread flouting of federal law called into question the power of the national government. The chapter traces the evolution of treason prosecutions, and later the creation of a general federal crime of conspiracy, finally achieved in the context of the Civil War and Reconstruction, as a response to this problem. By the early twentieth century, it argues, these developments had become so uncontroversial that few questioned the existence of conspiracy as a federal crime, and the long history of its contested creation was now forgotten. The development of conspiracy as a federal crime, it argues, should be seen as an episode of state-building, achieved without the extension of bureaucratic apparatus that might attach to such a project. Indeed, it is implicit in this account that the contours of the familiar strong state/weak state debate should be completely rethought, as a state might be “strong” and “weak” along various dimensions.
Disciplines
Criminal Law | Law | Legal History
Recommended Citation
Sarah Seo,
“Kindred to Treason”: Conspiracy Laws in the United States,
In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries, Kenneth W. Mack & Jacob Katz Cogan (Eds.), Oxford University Press
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4615
